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Rakshasa is a creation of Jonathan Brossard to backdoor hardware. It's OS independent and fairly permanent: you can even swap your hard disk and it will prevail. it uses Coreboot and other free software packages to work its magic. Are you sure what lives in your firmwares?

Many people have complained about the lack of pre-integrated computers running GNU/Linux or the lack of fully free software drivers for important hardware. Ultimately though, it’s up to you, the consumer, both to satisfy your own requirements and to send a message to vendors that supporting free software pays. You can do this fairly easily by integrating your own computer from its major components, and selecting only components that have free software drivers. It’s certainly possible, and even if you’ve never built a computer before, it’s not all that hard!

Winds of change are sweeping through the software industry. Today, it’s no longer fashionable to decry free software types as it was just a few years ago — the cool kids are all “leveraging” and reaching out to free software communities. But not everyone’s doing it right, so let’s explore how to start a positive relationship with free software.

RMS: "That is completely backwards. The free software movement is a political cause, not a technical one. 'Choose based on technical criteria first of all' is the opposite of what we say. [...] The GNU Project is not just a collection of software packages. Its intended result is a coherent operating system. It is particularly important therefore that GNU packages should work well with other GNU packages. For instance, we would like Emacs to work well with git or mercurial, but we especially want it to work well with Bzr..."

Linux and other Unix-like operating systems use the term "swap" to describe both the act of moving memory pages between RAM and disk, and the region of a disk the pages are stored on. It is common to use a whole partition of a hard disk for swapping.

In a posting on his FSF blog, Richard Stallman has apologised for "repeating a criticism of Mac OS which I cannot substantiate and must presume is false". The claim, that Mac OS X has a backdoor which could install changes without the user's permission, is one that Stallman has repeated, but he now says there "is no basis to claim there is one".

The free software community understands that free software gives the user more freedom than proprietary software. Proprietary software confines its users, prohibits them from making changes that would allow everyone to benefit, etc. Free software advocates (myself included) have a habit of claiming that using free (libre) software means the same thing as having freedom.

"Keith Curtis, an 11-year veteran of Microsoft, takes a programmer’s approach in “Software Wars,” attempting to systematically build a case that free software can help pave the way for a 21st-century renaissance in many fields ranging from artificial intelligence (cars that drive themselves) to the human journey into space (space elevators). For Mr.

"...Even though MakerBot is both a hardware and software solution, the ideals and infrastructure that the free software movement has pushed forward has given us the scaffolding to build the 3D printing hardware we share with our community and the world using the GPL license..."

* Create a tuned server appliance, containing your application and just enough operating system components
* Spin a live CD or DVD with just the packages and software you need
* Create a ready-to-run VMware or Xen virtual server appliance

* Create a live USB key and carry your Linux system with you wherever you go
* Build a hard disk image for preloading onto hardware